In recent years there has been a substantial increase in the population of prison inmates in our prison systems across the country. Prisons have become overcrowded with jail inmates, and some of the current jails house more prisoners per cell than the amount of inmates for which each jail cell was designed. This causes prison population instability and dangerous overcrowding. Further, the costs for managing such dense populations increases due to the increased number of security systems and prison guards required to manage such an overcrowded situation.
One reason for current prison inmate overcrowding is that, generally, state constituents refuse to allocate additional tax dollars for the purpose of housing and protecting inmates and the general distaste for spending money on law breakers. The required tax increases stem also, in part, from the dramatic rise in costs for building additional prisons, and the lengthy construction time required to construct such prison systems.
In response, various construction companies have attempted to prefabricate portions of prisons and install them on location in accordance with preselected specifications. While the construction industry has migrated from on-site, custom fabrication of user specified dwellings to prefabricating dwelling portions that are connected and interlocked on location in accordance with standardized designs, the construction of prison systems has not fully embraced these advances in prefabrication. For instance, the shipping container industries and government housing construction industries have migrated to 60% or more of preconstructed materials, prison construction projects utilize far less prefabricated portions. This may be due to the fact that construction of prefabricated cells for prison systems have different requirements than nominal population living quarters. Security concerns, ventilation and sanitation density, systematic and controlled entrance way requirements, and internal safety and security for multiple inmate enclosures, all contribute to making the design of a prefabricated cell complicated and, generally, expensive.
Therefore, what is needed in today's prison systems is a prefabricated prison cell that allows for relatively inexpensive fabrication and structures for interlocking multiple cells on-site in a convenient and efficient manner.